Domesday Book

Domesday Book opens as a haunting poetic inquest into the life and death of Elenor Murray, whose mysterious body is found by a river near Starved Rock with no obvious cause of death. From the first pages, her fate becomes more than a private tragedy: the speaker treats one woman's life as a spiritual census of America, tracing the ripples of birth, love, family, gossip, and grief across an entire community. A strange banner in her pocket, bearing Joan of Arc and the words "To be brave, and not to flinch," deepens the book's sense of symbolic mystery. At the center is Coroner Merival, a thoughtful landowner whose own heartbreak and disillusionment led him to the office as a way of confronting human waste and hidden causes. As he gathers testimony from Dr. Trace, Henry Murray, and others, the inquest exposes domestic resentment, thwarted ambition, sexual jealousy, and the fragile line between accident, guilt, and fate. Interwoven confessions, courtship memories, and moral reckonings turn the investigation into a larger meditation on desire, sin, self-knowledge, and the cost of being judged by others. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.